You did not really believe Enzo Maresca when he called this Chelsea’s toughest game of the season yesterday, and you knew he didn’t himself either when you saw his team.
But whatever part of the pretence had survived until kick-off died swiftly when the football began. On a frankly comic evening at St. Mary’s, a Southampton side admittedly missing a handful of key players showed exactly why they are already charging back towards the Championship, with only a third of the season gone.
Weirdly, in being quite so inept, they denied Chelsea the chance to enhance their growing reputation, even as a 5-1 victory closed the gap on leaders Liverpool to seven points.
Officially, Maresca’s side won this game but, really, they didn’t have to. Given the time of year, it is tempting to say it was handed to them gift-wrapped, but Southampton didn’t even bother to do that. This was straight out of the shop stuff, handed over in a carrier bag, the receipt still inside and the accompanying card written out in a bookmaker’s pen.
Self-destruction has been Southampton’s stock and trade this season but this was a genuine masterclass, best summed up not by any of the goals but by the red card that left the hosts down to ten men before half-time. From their own attacking corner, no less, Saints lost their captain, Jack Stephens, sent off for a petulant hair-pull on Marc Cucurella that was picked up and deemed violent conduct by VAR. Now, to be fair, no man, woman or child has ever been within five yards of that barnet and not been tempted to give it a tug. But come on, Jack. There’s a time and a place.
For Maresca, who has been threatening to hand his Conference League second-string their Premier League chances for months, this was both.
There were seven changes to the side that beat Aston Villa on Sunday, including a Premier League debut in goal for Fillip Jorgensen and a first league start since the opening day of the season for Christopher Nkunku, who inevitably scored to take his tally for the campaign to 12.
Maresca had seen his Leicester score nine goals in two meetings with Russell Martin’s side in the Championship last term, an explanation perhaps for why this trip was seen as so ripe for rotation. Or maybe it was habit, having given his regulars their midweeks off for months.
Hard as it is to believe given what followed, there was a genuine vulnerability to Chelsea in the opening 20 minutes and certainly none of the controlling authority that had seen Villa so comprehensively outplayed as Southampton got in behind both full-backs repeatedly and to the front door of a new-look centre-back pair with troubling ease. They scored, too, in that period through Joe Aribo. Trouble was they allowed Chelsea to, twice, as well.
Joe Lumley, probably Southampton’s fourth-choice goalkeeper, bore the brunt of the noisy blame. He was tame flapping at Enzo Fernandez’s corner, which Axel Disasi headed in, and then part of a typically hapless passage playing out that was punished by Noni Madueke and Nkunku.
Looking like you might score whenever you attack is one thing. But every time the home goalkeeper has the ball? At one stage here the home crowd actually cheered a Lumley hoof out of the hands. At another, his defenders scuttled off to halfway and simply refused to come short in a bid to force the matter.
Chelsea, for a while, stopped trying to play themselves, failing to see the point when they could just sit and wait for Southampton to trip over their own feet. Madueke’s third goal and then Stephens’s sending-off settled the contest before half-time.
Chelsea could have had any number thereafter, the fourth and fifth eventually scored late on by Cole Palmer and substitute Jadon Sancho.
The scoreline by then, though, was secondary to the feeling, a raucous away end singing Maresca’s name with greater gusto than at any point in his tenure, which is only six months old this week. Momentum is building at Chelsea. with or without this kind of helping hand.
